Paul began his discourse at the Areopagus by speaking of walking through Athens. Amid a city full of gods and idols of various sorts, he reported finding “an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.'” This altar was intended to cover the Athenians and stay in the good graces of any god they hadn’t yet learned about.

I have written and spoken previously about this Bible passage, which is read in Catholic masses on the Wednesday of the sixth week of Easter. It’s a fantastic example of understanding what your audience believes and launching your attempt to sway their strategic thinking by recognizing where you agree rather than where you disagree.

Strategic Thinking and Unknown Ideas

It struck me yesterday how, from the audience’s perspective, this is also a wonderful story to reflect how we receive new, unknown ideas and strategic thinking.

It’s easy, over time, to fill our heads with ideas and strategic thinking that define our world view and represent our attempt to explain everything we have experienced. It’s also easy to become so fascinated with our own strategic thinking that we leave no room to consider new ways of doing things or opposing points of view.

Some people take this to such an extreme that they can’t even consider opposing ideas simply to understand why people hold them even if they have no intention of believing or embracing these ideas.

Here’s a reminder for all of us: as you grow in years and experience, keep a space that never goes away where you are willing to hear others on new, unknown ideas.

Because if you’re going to grow in your strategic thinking capabilities, you can never NOT have the mental space to hear, consider, and potentially expand your thinking. – Mike Brown

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.comor call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

She recommended he and his wife sit down individually with two blank sheets of paper. Each of them is to take a few minutes to write at least fifteen sexual adventures of interest they have never tried previously. They are to then exchange pieces of paper and cross off things they weren’t prepared to do until they had a new bedroom (or elsewhere) to-do list agreeable to each of them.

Strategic Thinking Exercises from a Sex Tip

I was immediately taken with turning the response into multiple strategic thinking exercises for pairs or groups of individuals to identify, mutually approve, and implement new ideas.

Just as easily as a married couple, organizations or individuals within organizations in strategic relationships could use this technique to identify new, mutually-beneficial initiatives. It also provides a different spin on tired, old strategic thinking exercises for prioritizing large numbers of ideas.

The response from the “Girl Next Door” also inspired an idea about creating a 64-idea field of potential initiatives and using a college basketball single elimination format to pick winning and losing ideas from among a large pool of possibilities.

So yes, it is possible for a sex tip to boost your strategic thinking.

You just have to be on the lookout for new ideas all the time, no matter whether they are far away or right next door! – Mike Brown

Messaging with Whip-Smart Wordsmith Emma Alvarez Gibson on Facebook, we were discussing business situations you know aren’t going to work out as you want, yet you move forward anyway. In one situation I was describing, Emma asked why I’d move ahead knowing the outcome wouldn’t be great.

My response was sometimes you take crap from people because you’ve done the strategic thinking and there is a very good strategic reason to do so.

This realization came from living in the Fortune 500 world as long as I did. You have to develop a strong sense of what those right times are if you expect to survive.

9 Business Situations Where You Might Take Crap from People

After we finished messaging, I wrote this list of nine business situations where it can make sense to take crap from somebody in business:

There is a strategic advantage to be gained and taking crap is a small hurdle standing in the way.

You don’t have any better strategic options, so it’s tough to avoid it.

You can delegate or deflect the brunt of the crap-taking to someone else.

Taking crap from a particular person is a badge of honor you can use as a proof point of some personal strength, capability, or perseverance.

The stories you’ll be able to tell about the experience outweigh the downsides.

Nobody will know the difference.

Giving people crap is just something another person does that is more annoying than harmful.

You don’t or won’t even notice it.

You know everything will still work out in the end.

This list is certainly open to question and challenge based on how you view the strategic thinking behind one of these business situations.

What’s your strategic thinking about this?

What about you? Are there situations where you’ll take crap from someone for good reason?

If you’d like to read the brand strategy lesson from our experience, you can do so over on LinkedIn.

As an alternative, we also put together a screencast that recaps the article plus adds visuals the LinkedIn article does not contain. This is the first time we’re introducing screencasts into the blog. We’re excited by the possibilities because it gives you the opportunity to have a richer experience with Brainzooming blog content. Additionally, because audio and visuals are incorporated in a screencast, I expect it to open up new topics that just don’t come across as strongly when using words alone.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you with a strategy session and branding development to create strategic impact for your organization.

During a recent “Creating Strategic Impact” workshop, I had the attendees (who were all from one company) form smaller groups to identify potential disruptive competitive threats in their technology industry.

Talking in advance with the client organization’s president, he said his people might struggle with this strategic thinking exercise since they hadn’t previously addressed competitive threats this way.

The One Strategic Truth You Must Never Forget

One group had a participant who quickly completed the first part of the strategic thinking exercise, listing three clear customer benefits his company delivered.

But then instead of identifying companies who might offer any one of those benefits individually, he put a big, bold imaginary circle around those three customer benefits. This quickly dead-ended the strategic thinking exercise as he claimed NO competitor could come to the market with all those benefits. As a result, he reaffirmed his belief that his company had few, if any, disruptive competitive threats.

The other participants in his small group perceived the flaw and tried to help him see the error in his perspective. I too tried to redirect him, pointing out that truly disruptive competitive threats targeting his company weren’t going to show up nice bows around all three benefits his company delivered.

In fact, very real disruptive competitive threats might appear offering only ONE of those benefits, with little concern for the other two. This new disruptive force would win business with a different approach, different strategies, and different perceptions about what is important to my client’s customers.

Because it was a workshop format, there was no opportunity to spend any more time with this individual to see if he was finally persuaded about competitive threats or not. But whether he was or wasn’t, I suspect many of us, even though we know better, fall into the same trap.

Disruptive Competitive Threats

Let’s state it again so we can all be clear: the disruptive force in your industry isn’t going to show up looking like your brand and offering the same complete set of benefits.

The disruptive force may have only a vague resemblance to your brand and what you do, and win business because it sees the rules of competition and success very differently than your brand does.

That’s why so many companies who TRY reinventing themselves and staying successful fail. They have WAY TOO MUCH invested in every part of their status quo (and likely antiquated) views of the world. Unwilling to blow themselves up because they have too big a stake in what has existed for a long time and persists to today, some other brand with an insightful view of tomorrow is more than happy to do the work for them.

Think about it this way: No matter how much you might hope it might be different, you can’t have archaic and eat it too. – Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

While it seems numbers five and six are wildly different (i.e., one is suggesting “toe the line” and the other is advocating for going against the corporate strategy in a clandestine way), they are both very risky.

If the business unit truly has to sub-optimize to follow the prescribed corporate strategy, it should be a very conscious decision – not the accidental fallout of a strategic disconnect within the organization.

Similarly, making the decision to advance particular initiatives that are right for a business unit but clearly outside corporate strategy may be possible. But pursuing this strategy could be a recipe for huge problems for leadership and the overall organization.

That’s why both five and six, although wildly different strategies, are both very risky. If you decide to go there, be careful . . . very careful! – Mike Brown